Painters have been giving ordinary work the space of a king since at least 1551. This guide follows the market stall, the kitchen, the boat, the forge, the field and the operating theater through the centuries of painting, and sends each one on to its own collection page.
That year Pieter Aertsen painted a Meat Stall in which the Holy Family, the subject that was supposed to justify the picture, shrank to a small scene in the background. Most of the canvas belongs to a display of meat.
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That was an unusual choice in 1551, and the rules that came later did not undo it. In 1667 André Félibien, in the preface to the lectures of the French Academy, wrote that a painter who makes only portraits has not yet reached the high perfection of the art. To get there, he said, a painter has to represent great actions like the historians.
The painters kept going anyway, and what happened to them is the thread of this guide. The pictures that ran into trouble were not the ones about saints and kings. They were a field of women picking up leftover grain, shown at the Salon in 1857, a canvas of floor scrapers sent to the same Salon in 1875, and a surgeon at work, offered to a world's fair in 1876.
Six kinds of work follow, and each has a painting that tested the rule.
What You'll Discover
What hid behind the meat.
What waits in the kitchen wall.
What Homer's sailor is looking at.
Why the Salon refused the floor scrapers.
Why gleaners frightened Paris.
Where the surgeons' portrait hung.